A Pail of Air was first published in 1964 by Ballantine as a Paperback

A Pail of Air contains his excellent satirical stories; The Beat Cluster, Pipe Dream, Bread Overhead, The Last Letter and Rum-Titty-Titty-Tum-Tah-Tee. The stories seem to be culled from Galaxy magazine. Nice cover art by Richard Powers. A lot of these stories can be found in Deadly Moon which is still available.

This is a wide ranging collection of his stories and, as an introduction to his work, probably one of the best available. It concentrates on his SF/Fantasy but doesn’t contain Fafhrd & Mouser stories, or his horror stories such as ‘Smoke Ghost’. It opens with a brief introduction by Leiber , some editions contains a warm tribute by Poul Anderson. Amazon claim to have a Kindle Version, this is called ‘Selected Stories‘ and is a different collection.

“Twenty two stories by this talented author whose work has ranged widely across the genres of fantasy and SF. The Hugo and Nebula award winning ‘Gonna Roll The Bones’ is an effective horror story. ‘Space Time For Springers’ is a delightful tale about cats. Other powerful pieces, which more closely fit the definition of SF, include ‘Coming Attraction’ and ‘America the Beautiful’.”The Ultimate Guide to Science Fiction – David Pringle